1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information offering system for providing information or services on a computer network.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent times, with the rapidly evolving complexity of the Internet, many enterprises, organizations and individual computer users are making available a large amount of information or services, such as sports, business, and leisure, on the networks using their own home pages.
Enterprises and organizations are offering, for the purpose of business or sales promotion, information about self-manufactured products (e.g., contents of games, in the case of a game developing company) and an access window for downloading of self-developed software using their own home pages. Meanwhile, individual users and organizations are offering, using their own home pages, various services, such as information introducing the strategy for newly developed games, forecasting information of horse races or information about a particular hobby.
An ordinary network user having a particular hobby corresponding to a home page of a person or organization, as explained above, in order to get the information about their own hobby, will be interested in accessing home pages related to the hobby. Therefore, there is now a commercial potential for using these home pages as an advertisement medium because ordinary users are beginning to access home pages offering useful information about particular hobbies.
Regarding advertisements on the Internet, it is more effective to place an advertisement, as in advertisements placed in more traditional media, in areas where there are likely to be seen and heard by people who are interested in the information or service appearing in that advertisement.
Accordingly, with the reason explained above, in the case of placing an advertisement for a product or service on the Internet, a person in charge of the company which is planning to place the advertisement makes a survey of all home pages which provide centralized access to information about the product or service to be advertised. Thereafter, the person in charge makes a request by mail or telephone to the owner of such home page to place an advertisement there. In this case, there is no problem when the person in charge of the company is familiar with information about the product or service and he can identify the home page having the highest access rate related to the product or service of concern.
However, if the person in charge is not familiar with the relevant information, it is a very difficult for him to identify a home page having a high access rate. In addition, even when he has some knowledge about the relevant information, it is difficult to identify desirable home pages, because retrieving software on the Internet often retrieves home pages that cannot be used. Moreover, it is essential to register the uniform resource locator (URL) of a home page along with the attribute of the home page for it to be possible for the home page to become retrievable by the retrieving software. Furthermore, personal home pages are often not registered.
Therefore, using the currently existing methods, the success of advertisements on the Internet has been a consequence mainly of the amount of work done by the administrator in charge of the company placing the advertisement. Consequently, it has been difficult to increase the number of places advertisements are displayed.
An advertisement on the Internet is formed of digital information making it possible to distribute such information through the network. Therefore, it is also possible to increase such advertisements by storing the advertisements in a server on the Internet. Namely, if it is possible for an Internet user who has made access to a home page on a server to register an advertisement for display on the user's own home page, the workload of the person responsible for getting the advertisements displayed can be reduced.
Moreover, as explained previously, a user who has accessed a particular home page may be interested in an attribute of that home page. Therefore, if viewing of an advertisement on the Internet can be increased among those having a particular hobby, the company can further reduce the work involved in Internet advertising, resulting in more efficient advertising. However, to increase distribution of advertisements, it is necessary to give an incentive to users to register their home pages to encourage them to register an advertisement pointing to a company's home page.
On the other hand, presentation of the advertisement in a home page requires revision of the contents of the home page. Although a personal home page is hosted by a server of an Internet service provider, the Internet service provider cannot freely revise the contents of the home page. Therefore, it is essential to get approval of the owner of the home page, because such revision is allowed only by the owner of the home page. Since revision of a personal home page will require access to the server of the Internet service provider, at least the communication ID and password for establishing communication with the Internet service provider are required.